3 ms·

The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distribut

The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company.

rhizome 13y ago
just work for an employee-owned company. How is this different than, "attaching yourself to a community," which you denigrated above?
- skyraider 13y ago
  Two ways: It's voluntary, and you might get some of the profits if the company goes in the green. In a state socialist economy, you have to go work on the pig farm or whatever. In a market-ish economy, the attachment to a particular community is more voluntary. You can, more often that not, choose which one you want to join.
unimpressive 13y ago
>The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Great, that's cleared up. It was ambiguous to me whether you meant in the systems sense or the one you've outlined here. >Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company. I think that this is where the authoritarianism of most far left and right movements comes from. (Like Communism in the Soviet sense or Fascism in the Italian sense.) In a free market economy, the score is kept with money. This necessarily means that everything which makes you make less money is bad. So you have an incentive to use less resources when making a product, and thus creates incentives for certain kinds of R&D. Consumers will obviously pay the same for better, so you also want to have the best product in your price range. Which is your incentive to keep improving your product. Both of these effects will improve products and make them cheaper. It also means that when a finite resource is considered a public commons or otherwise not given its "proper market value", that it will be ruthlessly used up by money maximizing organizations. It also means that a profitable practice that produces some negative social ill will not be factored into the free market optimization process. Generally, these are called externalized costs. And one of the Big Problems (TM) of the 21st century will be figuring out how to deal with them. Global warming is largely an externalized cost, to the extent that it exists. (I can't give a knowledgeable opinion on that topic one way or the other.) Another externalized cost is worker happiness, a money maximizer that can get more money by driving its workers harder will. And in a free market economy it will also prevail against more ethical organizations. This means that you have a few options: Find a model where working workers less is beneficial to money maximizing. Find a model where you can simply force money maximizers to be more ethical. (At least, those are the two I can think of.) Without commenting on the possibility of the first, which of the two seems easier? To me at least, it seems much easier for Vladimir Lenin or Benito Mussolini to decree that factories dumping waste into rivers will stop and start sending the waste to a designated disposal facility, on pain of death or imprisonment. Or in the context of a representative democracy, face huge fines. This is why those ideologies which speak of a bourgeois (Before becoming a Fascist, Benito Mussolini was a Socialist, and took inspiration from left ideologies.[0]) usually employ the most authoritarian states. They exist by the following reasoning. A dictatorship of the proletariat exists to counter act the free market forces which cause the exploitation of the proletariat in the first place. Therefore it must have control of the economy. Of course, an organization that controls the economy controls everything. "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." - Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, but I don't have a reliable source. Moreover, the "exploitation of the proletariat" is a moral issue. If the state is allowed to dictate on this moral issue, then surely it can dictate on all of them. (Partly a constitution in the American sense exists so as to say "You can't dictate on these moral issues.". One of the consequences of this is that some of the most thorny political problems involve changes to the constitution.) As Paul Graham points out in 'Inequality and Risk', a lot of innovation comes out of people trying to make money. And if you're not on top of the innovation heap you may as well be on the bottom. "Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it." - Paul Graham, 'Inequality and Risk' Free market forces aren't a result of any conscious design, they're what you get when you predicate your society on making money. (Which, assuming that in your country making money is correlated positively with making wealth, countries that have free markets will probably have a decent amount of wealth.) To counter act free market forces you must either instill a near universal belief in an ideology which gets people to act against them, or have so much power that you can stop them from arising. Usually both. The problem is that even if you can wield enough power to suspend the free market over a large geographic area, unless you control the world you'll have serious trouble competing in the free market forces on the nation state scale. Which leads to this quote by Mussolini which I currently use as my Litmus test for Fascism, which itself is something of a meta-ideology in its attitude. "From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." [1] So for Authoritarian regimes on the left or right, the only option to enforce their ideology is world domination. By force or by revolution. Again, usually both. [0]: “Therefore I became the public crier of this basic, partisan, warlike conception. The time had come to shake the souls of men and firet their minds to thinking and acting. It was not long before I was proclaimed the mouthpiece of the intransigent revolutionary socialist faction. I was only twenty-nine years old when at Reggio Emilia at the Congress in 1912, two years before the world war began, I was nominated as director of the Avanti. It was the only daily of the socialist cause and was published in Milan.” - Mussolini, My Autobiography [1]: One of the ironies of this idea is that in a world where it was universally employed, Mussolini himself would not be able to have done what he did.
daenli 13y ago
Were you by any chance referring to Project Cybersyn[1] started by the Chilean government under Allende? It was meant to be a strictly centrally-coordinating body than a "top-down command and control" system. The room that you mentioned in this case is the "Opsroom[2]", where the officials can see the relevant economic data from different industries across Chile and advise accordingly. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn [2]http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/opsroom.html# http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/opsroom.html#

rhizome 13y ago

just work for an employee-owned company. How is this different than, "attaching yourself to a community," which you denigrated above?

skyraider 13y ago
Two ways: It's voluntary, and you might get some of the profits if the company goes in the green. In a state socialist economy, you have to go work on the pig farm or whatever. In a market-ish economy, the attachment to a particular community is more voluntary. You can, more often that not, choose which one you want to join.

unimpressive 13y ago

>The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Great, that's cleared up. It was ambiguous to me whether you meant in the systems sense or the one you've outlined here. >Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company. I think that this is where the authoritarianism of most far left and right movements comes from. (Like Communism in the Soviet sense or Fascism in the Italian sense.) In a free market economy, the score is kept with money. This necessarily means that everything which makes you make less money is bad. So you have an incentive to use less resources when making a product, and thus creates incentives for certain kinds of R&D. Consumers will obviously pay the same for better, so you also want to have the best product in your price range. Which is your incentive to keep improving your product. Both of these effects will improve products and make them cheaper. It also means that when a finite resource is considered a public commons or otherwise not given its "proper market value", that it will be ruthlessly used up by money maximizing organizations. It also means that a profitable practice that produces some negative social ill will not be factored into the free market optimization process. Generally, these are called externalized costs. And one of the Big Problems (TM) of the 21st century will be figuring out how to deal with them. Global warming is largely an externalized cost, to the extent that it exists. (I can't give a knowledgeable opinion on that topic one way or the other.) Another externalized cost is worker happiness, a money maximizer that can get more money by driving its workers harder will. And in a free market economy it will also prevail against more ethical organizations. This means that you have a few options: Find a model where working workers less is beneficial to money maximizing. Find a model where you can simply force money maximizers to be more ethical. (At least, those are the two I can think of.) Without commenting on the possibility of the first, which of the two seems easier? To me at least, it seems much easier for Vladimir Lenin or Benito Mussolini to decree that factories dumping waste into rivers will stop and start sending the waste to a designated disposal facility, on pain of death or imprisonment. Or in the context of a representative democracy, face huge fines. This is why those ideologies which speak of a bourgeois (Before becoming a Fascist, Benito Mussolini was a Socialist, and took inspiration from left ideologies.[0]) usually employ the most authoritarian states. They exist by the following reasoning. A dictatorship of the proletariat exists to counter act the free market forces which cause the exploitation of the proletariat in the first place. Therefore it must have control of the economy. Of course, an organization that controls the economy controls everything. "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." - Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, but I don't have a reliable source. Moreover, the "exploitation of the proletariat" is a moral issue. If the state is allowed to dictate on this moral issue, then surely it can dictate on all of them. (Partly a constitution in the American sense exists so as to say "You can't dictate on these moral issues.". One of the consequences of this is that some of the most thorny political problems involve changes to the constitution.) As Paul Graham points out in 'Inequality and Risk', a lot of innovation comes out of people trying to make money. And if you're not on top of the innovation heap you may as well be on the bottom. "Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it." - Paul Graham, 'Inequality and Risk' Free market forces aren't a result of any conscious design, they're what you get when you predicate your society on making money. (Which, assuming that in your country making money is correlated positively with making wealth, countries that have free markets will probably have a decent amount of wealth.) To counter act free market forces you must either instill a near universal belief in an ideology which gets people to act against them, or have so much power that you can stop them from arising. Usually both. The problem is that even if you can wield enough power to suspend the free market over a large geographic area, unless you control the world you'll have serious trouble competing in the free market forces on the nation state scale. Which leads to this quote by Mussolini which I currently use as my Litmus test for Fascism, which itself is something of a meta-ideology in its attitude. "From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." [1] So for Authoritarian regimes on the left or right, the only option to enforce their ideology is world domination. By force or by revolution. Again, usually both. [0]: “Therefore I became the public crier of this basic, partisan, warlike conception. The time had come to shake the souls of men and firet their minds to thinking and acting. It was not long before I was proclaimed the mouthpiece of the intransigent revolutionary socialist faction. I was only twenty-nine years old when at Reggio Emilia at the Congress in 1912, two years before the world war began, I was nominated as director of the Avanti. It was the only daily of the socialist cause and was published in Milan.” - Mussolini, My Autobiography [1]: One of the ironies of this idea is that in a world where it was universally employed, Mussolini himself would not be able to have done what he did.

daenli 13y ago

Were you by any chance referring to Project Cybersyn[1] started by the Chilean government under Allende? It was meant to be a strictly centrally-coordinating body than a "top-down command and control" system. The room that you mentioned in this case is the "Opsroom[2]", where the officials can see the relevant economic data from different industries across Chile and advise accordingly. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn [2]http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/opsroom.html# http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/opsroom.html#